Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer: The Man Who Gave Up Everything Twice

By 1905 Albert Schweitzer was thirty and had already finished two careers most people would consider a life's work. He was an ordained Lutheran minister about to publish the book that would detonate a century of liberal theology, and he was one of Europe's finest organists, the author of a study of Bach that is still in print. That year he enrolled as a first-year medical student. Eight years later he sailed for equatorial Africa to build a hospital in a place with no doctor, and stayed, on and off, for fifty-two years, until he died there.

An Alsatian Pastor's Son

He was born on 14 January 1875 in Kaysersberg, in Alsace — German territory then, French after 1919, a border identity he carried all his life. His father, Louis Théophile Schweitzer, was a Lutheran-Evangelical pastor; his mother was Adèle Schillinger. His cousin Anne-Marie Schweitzer became the mother of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Music arrived first. He studied organ under Eugène Munch from 1885, and later in Paris with Charles-Marie Widor, the most celebrated French organist of the age. He was ordained in 1900.

Bach, and the Historical Jesus

In 1905 he published *J. S. Bach: Le Musicien-Poète*, expanded into two German volumes by 1908 and translated into English in 1911. Its central claim was that Bach's chorale preludes are pictorial — that the music paints, in tone and rhythm, the images of the texts it accompanies. He co-founded the Paris Bach Society the same year, and in 1906 published a pamphlet on organ construction that launched the *Orgelbewegung*, the movement to return organ building to Baroque principles. He was a musicologist whose theories reshaped both the interpretation of a composer and the physical manufacture of an instrument.

In 1906 he also published *Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung*, translated in 1910 as *The Quest of the Historical Jesus*. It surveyed a century of scholarly attempts to recover the real Jesus behind the Gospels and concluded that every one of them had produced a Jesus conveniently resembling its own author. Schweitzer's alternative was harder to swallow: that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who genuinely expected the imminent end of the world, and was wrong. He argued too that Paul's central category was mystical union — "being in Christ" — rather than justification by faith. It remains one of the most disruptive books in the history of New Testament scholarship.

The Decision

He began medicine at the University of Strasbourg in 1905 and took his M.D. in 1913. His dissertation examined the mental health of Jesus, which is a characteristic move: having demolished the liberal Jesus as a scholar, he now assessed him as a clinician.

In June 1912 he married Helene Bresslau, a municipal orphan inspector and the daughter of the historian Harry Bresslau. She trained as a nurse. The Paris Missionary Society accepted him as a physician, and in 1913 the couple left for French Equatorial Africa.

Lambaréné

The hospital he founded near Lambaréné, in what is now Gabon, was built of corrugated iron: a consulting room, an operating theatre, a dispensary, a sterilising room. In the first nine months he examined roughly two thousand patients. The caseload was tropical medicine at its rawest — malaria, sleeping sickness, dysentery, yaws, leprosy, sandflea infestation.

The First World War interrupted it. As a German national in French territory he was interned, and he returned to Europe in 1917 suffering from exhaustion and tropical anaemia. He reopened the hospital in 1924 and expanded it substantially over the following two years. He funded it, in large part, by touring Europe as a concert organist and giving the proceeds to Gabon — a doctor paying for his own hospital by playing Bach.

Reverence for Life, the Nobel, and the Bomb

His ethical philosophy, *Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben* — reverence for life — held that no one should harm or destroy any living thing except where genuinely unavoidable. Its foundational formulation was a piece of first-person phenomenology rather than argument: "I am life which wills to live, and I exist in the midst of life." From this he diagnosed the decline of Western civilisation as a failure to affirm life at all.

The 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 1953, cited "his altruism, reverence for life, and tireless humanitarian work which has helped making the idea of brotherhood between men and nations a living one." He accepted with an address called "The Problem of Peace" and put the $33,000 into a leprosarium at Lambaréné.

He then spent his last thirteen years campaigning against nuclear weapons, working alongside Einstein, Otto Hahn and Bertrand Russell, and co-founding the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in 1957. On 23 April 1957 he broadcast his "Declaration of Conscience" over Radio Oslo: "The end of further experiments with atom bombs would be like the early sunrays of hope which suffering humanity is longing for." Queen Elizabeth II made him an honorary member of the Order of Merit in 1955; he had taken the Goethe Prize in 1928 and would receive the James Cook Medal in 1959.

"My Junior Brother"

The reputation has not survived intact, and the reasons are substantial. The journalist James Cameron visited Lambaréné in 1953 and found squalor, an absence of modern amenities, and remarkably little contact between Schweitzer and the local population. Chinua Achebe attacked him for a sentence he actually wrote — "The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother" — and for hygiene standards Achebe compared to medicine before germ theory. Schweitzer described Africans as "children" who required "authority," and later reformulated the line as "I am your brother, it is true, but your elder brother." Eventually he conceded that "the time for speaking of older and younger brothers has passed," which is an admission rather than a defence.

There is a case on the other side. His biographer Edgar Berman argued that surgical survival rates at Lambaréné matched many Western hospitals, and that allowing patients' families to stay with them — one of the practices visitors found primitive — measurably improved outcomes under severe resource constraints.

Why Albert Is Called a Genius

The claim is unusual because it is not about depth in one field but about genuine first-rank achievement in three unrelated ones. *The Quest of the Historical Jesus* reoriented New Testament scholarship for a century. The Bach book changed how the music is interpreted, and the 1906 organ pamphlet changed how the instruments are built. The medical degree was taken from scratch at thirty and used for half a century in the hardest conditions available. Very few people manage one of these; the combination is close to unexampled, and it was held together by a single ethical idea he formulated himself and then obeyed to the letter. The Nobel Committee honoured the philosophy, not merely the charity.

The honest counter-case is that the moral authority the word "genius" borrows here is compromised. Schweitzer's paternalism toward the Africans he served was not incidental to his worldview but embedded in it, and Achebe's criticism has largely won the argument. His hospital was, by the standards of 1953, poorly run. His theology, for all its force, is a work of demolition more than construction. And reverence for life is an ethical intuition asserted with enormous conviction rather than a philosophical system that can be defended step by step — which is why philosophers cite him less often than admirers do. He was a great man with a nineteenth-century mind, and both halves of that sentence are load-bearing.

Legacy

He died on 4 September 1965 at his hospital in Lambaréné, aged ninety. The hospital still operates, and his daughter Rhena Schweitzer Miller carried on the work.

What endures most cleanly is the smallest thing: the proposition that the burden of proof falls on whoever proposes to destroy a living thing. It cost him two brilliant careers to act on it.

Achievements

• Pour le Mérite
• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1948
• Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1950
• Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts order — 1954
• Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1950
• Honorary member of the Order of Merit — 1955
• Notable work: The Quest of the Historical Jesus
• Held posts at University of Strasbourg
• Educated at University of Strasbourg, University of Tübingen and philosophy faculty of the German university of Prague
• Fields of research: philosophy